


Secondhand Solutions

by cecilkirk



Series: fic prompts [2]
Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-20
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-22 06:41:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6069076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cecilkirk/pseuds/cecilkirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>cheap champagne and a complicated lifestyle; or, new year's eve and ponderance</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secondhand Solutions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sarajevo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarajevo/gifts).



10:41

Just over an hour to midnight. Just enough time to change his life.

What was the point of resolutions, anyway? As if a promise made among friends wasn’t any more than ostensibly responsible, as if it wasn’t done for public eyes. No one was going to wake up in eight hours’ time and suddenly be filled with a desire to exercise or read more. Everyone waited to change their lives, saved these decisions for an hour deemed holy.

And for what? To abandon these changes in three weeks and sink back into old routines. No change was ever really made. People waited months to change their lives and never stuck to their vows because they were affixed to a date. Procrastinated. Deemed valid because of the symmetry between end of the calendar year and the end of shitty, boring lives.

Ryan swirls the beer around his half-empty bottle. Calendars didn’t mean anything. They were human-made, because humans needed structure. People failed to realize they had the power to change their lives every waking moment. One word, one action—that was all it took to change a world.

He slammed the rest of the beer, grabbed another from between a group of people.

Rare was it that people acted without the permission of their peers.

 

11:07

Just shy of an hour to midnight. Just enough time to reflect.

Change, change, change…change was always good. He feared falling into ruts, routines, not being destructive enough to find originality. Creating was one way to express himself, but destruction—it was more efficient, swifter, uglier, but better.

He doesn’t know three quarters of the people in this room, and maybe this should change. It was good to be around friends, family, people he loved, and people who loved him. But up until recently, that had been a routine. A rut. A chance to fall into something, make it too familiar, too worn, until he became desperate to end it.

He had, after all, ended something two years ago because it was too familiar.

He looks at the scotch in his hand, not quite remembering picking it up. Familiarity had been at least one of the reasons he ended it, anyway.

And what did that make him? He had ended something nothing short of perfect, beautiful, because he couldn’t handle the routine.

He chokes, grits his teeth. That was a lie. He’d ended it because he couldn’t see its future. It existed far too largely out of his realm of imagination, prediction, action. He’d found it to be too far out of his control. He’d found himself drifting to things he shouldn’t have, to people he shouldn’t have—

The glass hits the table too hard, enough to crack the bottom slightly. Hairline fractures skitter a half inch up, but it’s usable. Ugly. And yet, maybe, a little prettier because it was ruined. Gave it character, uniqueness.

He’d like to think he was responsible for leaving some kind of positive impact on something.

 

11:56

Just a matter of seconds before the page flipped. Just a handful of minutes to do…anything. And everything. Just like always.

People around him were sharing their resolutions. They were vapid, recycled. Did no one take the time to find out who they were? Everyone could stand to read more or start exercising, but how was that anything meaningful? People were nothing more than the sum of their ideas, actions, words, beliefs, all gears and cogs in a machine. Stealing others’ gears because they fit a gap didn’t mean all the teeth would line up. Ryan thought that if he’d ever done anything worthwhile in his life, it was that he’d taken the time to use a flashlight on his own machinery. He knew what made him tick, even if it was ugly, full of cobwebs, rusted, whatever. It was him. He knew what to put in empty gaps.

“What about you, Ross?”

A hand claps him on the back. He has no idea who it belongs to, even as he looks the person in the eyes.

He shrugs. “Nothing.”

This starts a bout of drunken rambling ( _think you’re too cool for resolutions? listen up, guys! ryan thinks he’s too good for them!_ ) and he walks away, regretting it instantly.

He was always changing his life. He was always proactive about his problems. He didn’t need to wait. Maybe he was too good for resolutions.

Cheering erupts from the basement, creeping upwards until the crowd around him echoes it. Everyone is laughing, smiling, kissing. He rubs a finger over the cracks of his glass. Everyone was happy to use others’ gears, find simple solutions to problems that didn’t really matter.

Why couldn’t he? Why had he needed to probe his inner workings? And why had it been so painful? He’d tried everything he could, finally getting gears to match—the band, writing, all those shows, and all that time with—

His throat tightens. He knows very well what gear he needs.

Abandoning college for a band had been a risk, and it happened to have been for the best—the best outcome he could have imagined. He jumped, and the waves hadn’t pulled him under. He’d changed his life of his own volition.

He felt his phone, fishing it from his pocket. He was able to do it again.

One text—that was all. A few seconds to type, a few more for a response. And then…who knew what? Ryan was damned if he knew. This was so far out of his ability to predict, for his imagination to work. Maybe its depth prohibited this; maybe it resided so deep within him, so affixed to a gear its ruin would destroy it. It would destroy him.

If he couldn’t accept every possible outcome, he didn’t take the jump. But maybe the most worthwhile were the ones from which the waves couldn’t be seen.

He swallows. He types out a few lone words through quivering fingertips.

They glare back at him: _I miss you._

And maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s the people, maybe it’s the familiarity of having run so long with a gear missing, maybe it’s the inability to see the waves—

He backspaces, completely shuts off his phone, buries it in his pocket.

Maybe he could use a secondhand solution this year.


End file.
